Transport

D-Dalus - an entirely new genre of aircraft arrives. Austrian research company IAT21 has presented a new type of aircraft at the Paris Air Show which has the potential to become aviation's first disruptive technology since the jet engine.

View all The D-Dalus (a play on Daedalus from Greek mythology) is neither fixed wing or rotor craft and uses four, mechanically-linked, contra-rotating cylindrical turbines, each running at the same 2200 rpm, for its propulsion. The key to the D-Dalus' extreme maneuverability is the facility to alter the angle of the blades (using servos) to vector the forces, meaning that the thrust can be delivered in your choice of 360 degrees around any of the three axes. Hence D-Dalus can launch vertically, hover perfectly still and move in any direction, and that's just the start of the story.

"Holy s##t!" – the amazing Zero SR electric motorcycle blows our minds. It's been about three years since we last tested one of Zero Motorcycles' electric bikes, and in that time, the company has been very busy.

Compared to the 2011 Zero S, the 2014 Zero SR has between 200-400 percent more everything – riding this bike was an absolutely shocking progress report on the state of the art. The SR represents a liminal moment in motorcycling. We may look back in years to come and see this as the first time an electric motorcycle stood shoulder to shoulder with petrol powered bikes, and made them feel like yesterday's heroes.
Top 7 Reasons To Go For An Electric Vehicle. Cars Published on April 9th, 2014 | by Guest Contributor Originally published on the website of the Union of Concerned Scientists.By Josh Goldman You may have heard a lot recently about electric vehicles (EVs).

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Tesla Completes the West Coast Supercharger Corridor from San Diego to Vancouver. Tesla Motors just completed the West Coast Supercharger Corridor, a network of electric vehicle charging stations that stretches all the way from San Diego, California to Vancouver, British Columbia.

Boasting stations all along U.S. Highway 101 and Interstate 5, the Supercharger Corridor gives Model S owners the ability to travel up and down the west coast at no cost with zero range anxiety. With the new supercharger corridor in place, Model S customers can drive between San Diego, Los Angeles, Santa Barbara, San Francisco, Sacramento, Portland, Seattle, and Vancouver for free with minimal stops. More than 99 percent of Californians and 87 percent of Oregon and Washington owners are now within 200 miles of a Supercharger.
MIT Develops Ionic Wind Thrusters As An Efficient Alternative To Jet Engines.

Ion thruster photo from NASA A team from MIT is working on developing ionic wind thrusters as an energy-efficient, low-emission alternative to conventional propulsion technologies like jet engines.

The new thrusters would use ionic energy, which is created when a current passes between two electrodes. If one electrode is thinner than the other, it creates an air current in the space between them – and if a substantial voltage is applied, the device could produce powerful thrust without the need for fuel or motors.

Despite Google's Self-Driving Cars, Vehicle Autonomy Remains a Distant Destination. Driving on Interstate 495 toward Boston in a Ford Fusion one chilly afternoon in March, I did something that would’ve made even my laid-back long-ago driving instructor spit his coffee over the dashboard: I took my hands off the steering wheel, lifted my foot off the gas pedal, and waited to see what would happen.

The answer: not much. To a degree, the car was already driving itself. Sensors were busy tracking other vehicles and road markings; computer systems were operating the accelerator, the brake, and even the steering wheel. The car reduced its speed to keep a safe distance from the vehicle ahead, but as that car sped up again, mine did so too. I tried nudging the steering wheel so that we drifted toward the dotted line on my left.
Google’s Autonomous Vehicles Draw Skepticism at Legal Symposium.

Traveling by air on clouds could be the way of the future. London will host Formula E electric Grand Prix. This site uses cookies to store information on your computer.

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AIR TRANSPORT / AIRSHIPS: new ways to reduce transportation costs. Tesla Model S named 2013 Car of the Year by Motor Trend. Motor Trend has bestowed its coveted Car of the Year title on Tesla's Model S, making it the first car without an internal combustion engine to earn such an honor.

The vehicle won out of 25 other contenders, with a total of 45 variants. All of the vehicles were put through an "extensive battery of testing" that examined just about everything you can examine on a car.
Driverless cars approved by Nevada. Buying a Coal-Powered Car — Academic VC. I’d read all the news stories about NHTSA-induced fires, laughed at all the jokes, and watched Newt Gingrich claim that “You can’t put a gun rack in a Chevy Volt.”

(Wrong.) But I also read “Car Guys vs. Bean Counters” by Bob Lutz, who knows more about the automobile business than anyone alive… and who proudly declares himself to be the father of the Chevy Volt.
Semi-Autonomous Car Could be Licensed By Month’s End – Video. How wireless charging could boost the electric car. New Bi-Plane Design Promises All of the Sonic, None of the Boom. IAA 2011: BMW Motorrad Concept e. Individual mobility is increasingly defined in terms of sustainability.

The BMW Group has taken on the challenges of a rapidly changing world and is now developing serial production solutions to meet the mobility needs of the future. As an integrated part of the BMW Group, BMW Motorrad is also addressing issues of individual single-track mobility and future customer needs. In this connection, BMW Motorrad is expanding its business activities to include a new facet: that of “Urban Mobility”.
Researchers create first large-scale model of human mobility that incorporates human nature. For more than half a century, many social scientists and urban geographers interested in modeling the movement of people and goods between cities, states or countries have relied on a statistical formula called the gravity law, which measures the “attraction” between two places. Introduced in its contemporary form by linguist George Zipf in 1946, the law is based on the assumption that the number of trips between two cities is dependent on population size and the distance between the cities.

(The name comes from an analogy with Newton’s Law of Gravity, which describes the attraction of two objects based on mass and distance.)
Ingenious Infographic: U.S. Highways, Mapped Like A Subway System. The graphic language of the London Underground map is so iconic that "[insert any network or process here] visualized as a London Underground map" has become a design cliché. So why are we writing about the latest iteration, a Tube-style map of U.S. interstate highways, created by Cameron Booth?

Because, clichéd or not, visualizing this particular system in this way is actually damned useful.
Let the Robot Drive: The Autonomous Car of the Future Is Here. Photo: Spencer Higgins The object, vaguely pink, sits on the shoulder of the freeway, slowly shimmering into view. Is it roadkill? A weird kind of sagebrush? No, wait, it’s … a puffy chunk of foam insulation!
Honda Begins Deliveries of Battery-Powered Fit.